[Koralatov]

Okay, I've said it publicly, and without any attempt at moderating my feelings on the matter. OS9 is a truly awful OS, and I am genuinely stumped at the totally irrational levels of fanaticism it seems to evoke in some. I've been using it sporadically for about a month now, and I genuinely, truly cannot see what's so great about it. Low End Mac, an otherwise interesting and well-written site, seems to be stuffed to the rafters with crazies who think OS9 is the best thing ever.

Even compared to Windows 95, OS9 is bad--it crashes a lot, takes longer than Tiger to boot on my Clamshell and feels like an OS developmentally-trapped in the early nineties. Whilst OSX is far from perfect, it is a quantum leap in comparison to OS9 in my view.

So, in lieu of being able to find out first-hand what's so great about it, I'm going to instead ask for others to explain it to me. Anyone willing step up to the plate?

[starman]

Um, why are you using it and not 10.2?

EDIT: Is today "Koralatov thinks everything is awful" day?

[sek929]

Some versions of 9 were more stable than others, plus, it was snappy™

Of course I wouldn't trade anything from 10.1 on for it.

[boots]

I'm still a fan of system 7. But I do likes me the OS X goodness.

[rickey939]

Do you have the debugged version of OS v9.2.2.2.2.2.3 installed?

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by starman 

Um, why are you using it and not 10.2?

I'm using it out of a perverse sense of curiosity/masochism, to see what all the fuss is about, and to play Rescue! Max. On a day to day basis, I use Tiger on the Clamshell, and it works really well.

EDIT: Is today "Koralatov thinks everything is awful" day?

It's more of a "Koralatov has rediscovered the word awful" day!

Originally Posted by sek929 

Some versions of 9 were more stable than others, plus, it was snappy™

I'm on 9.0 which might explain some of the issues I'm facing, but that still doesn't change the fact that it is a very primitive operating system, even judging it from the standards of the time. I also don't really find it much faster in normal use than OSX. Perhaps my slightly haxx0red install has something to do with it being slow, though.

Of course I wouldn't trade anything from 10.1 on for it.

I think that might be part of it, too. Once you move onto OSX, using any Mac OS before that seems very lacking in comparison. That said, I would never have actually defected to the Mac had it not been for OSX; much as I love beautiful computers (as displayed in my collection, reproduced in my sig), I couldn't use them if OS9 was on them as the only OS.

[Lateralus]

*Shrugs*

I still love OS 9. If there were more modern applications still being developed for it, I'd likely still be booting 9 regularly and happily.

And why is this in The Lounge?

[Chuckit]

The use of present tense in this thread is deceptive.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by rickey939 

Do you have the debugged version of OS v9.2.2.2.2.2.3 installed?

I think that is obviously the problem I'm facing!

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

I still love OS 9. If there were more modern applications still being developed for it, I'd likely still be booting 9 regularly and happily.

I'm not trolling, per se, more venting, and I am genuinely curious as to why people love it. I just genuinely do not understand how people can find it preferable to OSX. It's probably a failure on my part, but it exists nonetheless.

And why is this in The Lounge?

Because I'm less likely to get lynched here?

Seriously, it's here because it was more of a general discussion thread than a serious technical one. I may, however, have been in error placing it here...

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

The use of present tense in this thread is deceptive.

Quite possibly it is. Though, to my mind, it is just as accurate to say "OS9 is Just Really, Really Awful" as it would be to say "OS9 was Just Really, Really Awful".

[boots]

I was serious. System 7 (specifically, 7.5) was the pinnacle of pre-Darwin Mac OS. After that, they overloaded the extensions with crap that I, for one, never really needed. Of course, I'm also in the camp that Word 5 was the pinnacle of that particular entity. The only thing it has for me in the new versions that weren't in 5 is bloat.

Obviously I don't do a lot of specialty stuff in Word.

I stayed with Mac because of the Unix underpinnings of OS X. Seriously.

[starman]

System 7 rocked. It hurt throwing that box away.

[IceEnclosure]

I remember bringing my first Mac home, a 333 MHz iMac. Two USB ports and uh, an ethernet port! And OS 8.6 I believe. I was so pumped.

[MacosNerd]

My we like beating a dead horse don't we. OS9 is long gone and while some of us like Lat and myself still use and enjoy it. Bashing something that has been surpassed by another OS is weird.

The main reason Apple designed new os from the ground up was because the archtecture of OS9 could not handle those advanced features. The measure of an operating system is not measured by you liking it, but its stability and ability to do the job. OS9 was stable (for the most part) and allowed people like myself to work.

I suppose if you never used a Mac that predated OSX you could make judgements on system you have had limited experience with (when it was main OS)

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by boots 

I was serious. System 7 (specifically, 7.5) was the pinnacle of pre-Darwin Mac OS.

Huh. In my opinion, System 7 was where the classic Mac OS started going all wrong...

The thing I liked the most about OS X in the early days is that it actually reminded me of System 6 in a few ways.

[MacosNerd]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Huh. In my opinion, System 7 was where the classic Mac OS started going all wrong...

I dunno some of the improvements of system 7 as shown below really made system 7 THE classic OS.

MultiFinder is now the default finde
Memory management was updated: 32bit memory addressing implemented.
Virtual Memory was added
AppleTalk and AppleShare were built into the operating system, instead of being an option.
QuickTime debuted
A menu was added to the right end of the Menu Bar - the Application Menu, which showed a list of running programs and allowed users to switch between them.
The Trash was changed into a true folder, meaning that items put in it remained until it was emptied
Aliases also showed up in System 7
Drag and Drop – Instead of cutting/pasting text you could now select, and drag the text from one program to another.
Finder finally had color to take advantage of color monitors, this included interface elements being updated.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Huh. In my opinion, System 7 was where the classic Mac OS started going all wrong...

OK, I'm baffled. System 7 was the first version that a modern user might consider remotely useful. What was so wrong with it?

[cube-dude]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

The thing I liked the most about OS X in the early days is that it actually reminded me of System 6 in a few ways.

Had a thing for System 6 too, as it was my first Mac experience (ah, you never forget your first time ). 6.0.7 still runs my LC flawlessly.

By contrast, OS 9 (9.0.4, specifically) crashed so frequently that I almost wanted to throw my then-new Cube out the window. Almost.

[starman]

[boots]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Huh. In my opinion, System 7 was where the classic Mac OS started going all wrong...

Well, this isn't the first thing about which we've disagreed.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by cube-dude 

Had a thing for System 6 too, as it was my first Mac experience (ah, you never forget your first time ). 6.0.7 still runs my LC flawlessly.

By contrast, OS 9 (9.0.4, specifically) crashed so frequently that I almost wanted to throw my then-new Cube out the window. Almost.

Was that a stock install or did you have things installed (things, perhaps, that you couldn't have even installed on System 6)?

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

My we like beating a dead horse don't we. OS9 is long gone and while some of us like Lat and myself still use and enjoy it. Bashing something that has been surpassed by another OS is weird.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's weird to "bash" OS9. Perhaps superfluous, but not particularly weird. Aside form Rescue!, the reason I decided to install it was to see why some people are so committed to it, and I am truly confounded by that question. I'm not criticising you or Lateralus for using it, or enjoying using it, I just don't understand why you would.

The main reason Apple designed new os from the ground up was because the archtecture of OS9 could not handle those advanced features. The measure of an operating system is not measured by you liking it, but its stability and ability to do the job. OS9 was stable (for the most part) and allowed people like myself to work.

You're absolutely right--the fact I think OS9 is no good isn't a yard-stick of its worth. That said, I have found it unstable personally, and I know a few graphic designers who used it back in the day when it was the main OS who absolutely despise it, saying that it was crash-prone and (at times) slow, and that were glad to be shot of it. One of my dad's friends (a writer) has always been on Macs, and he used to complain bitterly about it too.

I suppose if you never used a Mac that predated OSX you could make judgements on system you have had limited experience with (when it was main OS)

I used Macs a fair bit in the mid-to-late nineties at school: they were Performas, and I actually really enjoyed using them, and thought they were fantastic machines. I couldn't for the life of you tell me exactly what OS was on them, but I suspect it might have been one of the sevens; it definitely wasn't OS9. Perhaps CharlesS is right, and the rot started to set in with System 7 and got worse from there on out.

[cube-dude]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Was that a stock install or did you have things installed (things, perhaps, that you couldn't have even installed on System 6)?

Stock. (sigh, sudden desire to play ShufflePuck Cafe ...)

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

OK, I'm baffled. System 7 was the first version that a modern user might consider remotely useful. What was so wrong with it?

Here's a few things off the top of my head:

1. I have a soft spot in my heart for System 6

2. System 7 is where the OS started getting slower, more bloated, and more crashy

3. System 7 broke tons of existing software

4. System 7 was where we started moving toward software always using installers instead of drag-and-drop installs

5. System 7.5.x was horrible - Type 11 errors all the frigging time, networking often notworking, lots of other weird stuff happening randomly. The second most unstable OS ever made, after Windows ME (7.1 was okay, I'll admit, although 7.0.x was also pretty damn buggy).

6. System 7.5.x was where Apple stopped innovating and started just buying shareware apps, sticking them in the OS, and calling them new features

7. System 7.x is where Apple started realizing they needed to rewrite the OS, and started spending development resources on the doomed projects of Pink and Copland, leaving the classic OS in "just patch it up with duct tape" mode

8. System 7 is the one that got minimally ported to the PowerPC, leaving much of the OS running in emulation and thus performing very poorly considering the hardware it was running on

9. It introduced virtual memory, yes. But that virtual memory scheme was half-assed and tended to slow the machine to a crawl, with the result being that most users turned it off

10. It was during the System 7 era that legions of apparently dissatisfied users switched over to Windows 95.

[boots]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Here's a few things off the top of my head:

1. I have a soft spot in my heart for System 6


3. System 7 broke tons of existing software

4. System 7 was where we started moving toward software always using installers instead of drag-and-drop installs
.....

Ok, I'll give you these points, but lots of OS upgrades break a ton of software. System 8 broke a ton of my stuff too. And we still have the installers, so this isn't better now. Nor can it be.

But the rest...especially the "people defecting" may not have been the OS per se. I contend it had to do with the 80- billion different hardware configurations that didn't have interchangable parts. Just like Windows, it had to be functional on all that various hardware. I think this was the issue, more than the system software itself.

Things got better when Steve came back and the product lines started to get unified.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by boots 

Ok, I'll give you these points, but lots of OS upgrades break a ton of software. System 8 broke a ton of my stuff too.

OS 8 may have broken one, maybe two apps that I had. System 7 broke much, much more.

And we still have the installers, so this isn't better now. Nor can it be.

We still have 'em... but far fewer apps use 'em, thanks to OS X's app bundle concept.

But the rest...especially the "people defecting" may not have been the OS per se. I contend it had to do with the 80- billion different hardware configurations that didn't have interchangable parts. Just like Windows, it had to be functional on all that various hardware. I think this was the issue, more than the system software itself.

So you deny that 7.5.x was ridiculously unstable (which it was)? There's a reason that "Error type 11" is the most famous classic Mac OS crash box - and that particular error existed mainly during the 7.5.x era (I believe it appeared in 7.5, and got renamed to something else in 8.0).

System 7.x is where Apple started getting really bad about every time they wanted to add a new feature, just throw it into an extension. Don't integrate it properly, just patch some traps and call it a day. Well, they probably figured they were just going to ditch this OS pretty soon anyway and replace it with Pink or Copland, so why not.

Side note: David Pogue once wrote a little song about System 7.5.x named "I'm Dreaming of a Clean System."

[boots]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

So you deny that 7.5.x was ridiculously unstable (which it was)?

It really depended upon which hardware you had. I never really had an issue with it.

[Kenneth]

Mac OS 9 is not that bad.

[MacosNerd]

I still like using it

[Railroader]

I use it every couple days. Well, my daughter uses it every couple days to run her "computer games" *cough education software cough*

It's 9.2 and man is it SNAPPY!

[harbinger75]

I started using Macs again with 8.6 (before that was when I was a kid using a II, I believe), then went through Jaguar before I was forced back into Windows XP. I really enjoyed the Mac OS after 9.0...not as many lock-ups and crashes at that point.

I have fond memories of my blue iMac running OS 9.2.2. Oh yeah, those were the days. Yet, I also fondly remember being a beta tester for OSX and wanting to lick my screen and all that.

With all the fun I had in pre-OSX land, I still cannot wait to get a new MBP and re-enter my surrealistic state of mind like I had before.

[Helmling]

Originally Posted by Koralatov 

Okay, I've said it publicly, and without any attempt at moderating my feelings on the matter. OS9 is a truly awful OS, and I am genuinely stumped at the totally irrational levels of fanaticism it seems to evoke in some. I've been using it sporadically for about a month now, and I genuinely, truly cannot see what's so great about it. Low End Mac, an otherwise interesting and well-written site, seems to be stuffed to the rafters with crazies who think OS9 is the best thing ever.

Even compared to Windows 95, OS9 is bad--it crashes a lot, takes longer than Tiger to boot on my Clamshell and feels like an OS developmentally-trapped in the early nineties. Whilst OSX is far from perfect, it is a quantum leap in comparison to OS9 in my view.

So, in lieu of being able to find out first-hand what's so great about it, I'm going to instead ask for others to explain it to me. Anyone willing step up to the plate?

I never liked the old Mac OS. I really didn't use 9 any more than any other iteration, so I can't comment on it compared to its predecessors. Mac OS always felt nearly as clunky as Windows 3.1 and I much preferred Windows 95 to any Mac. Then along came X...obviously it's a whole other world and now I'm a die-hard Mac cultist. I don't think any sane person can argue that OS X was anything but the "quantum leap" above OS 9 you give it credit for being...it was a quantum leap above anything anyone'd ever had before.

[Helmling]

Originally Posted by starman 

LOL! 2 megabytes of memory is required! Holy crap...remember those days?

[CharlesS]

2 MB of memory? Yeah, it'd boot, but you wouldn't be able to run any apps. I remember running System 7 in even 4 MB of memory really being a stretch. You needed at least 8 MB to be comfortable...

[goMac]

System 7 was an awesome upgrade from 6. Those were the really great days, all sorts of little shareware games, plus commercial Mac gaming support was pretty good too. LucasArts put out a bunch of awesome stuff.

System 8 broke my CD ROM drivers I was using at the time. Kind of made things painful...

[sek929]

Originally Posted by IceEnclosure 

I remember bringing my first Mac home, a 333 MHz iMac. Two USB ports and uh, an ethernet port! And OS 8.6 I believe. I was so pumped.

Word, I had an Orange...i mean tangerine one. Came with a whopping 64 MB of RAM

Originally Posted by Railroader 

It's 9.2 and man is it SNAPPY!

Damn straight. it wasn't until Jaguar that my G4 regained it's dignity speed-wise. The color wheel of doom far outweighed the minor quirks and overall stableness of 9.2.2.

Also 7.6 rocked on my hand-me-down Powermac 7200.

[PB2K]

I send free apple computers to poor countries, some of the imacs (trayloaders) can't handle a relevant softwareversion for Webdesign or Wordprocessing. I don't want to give the disadvantaged people another disadvantage by teaching them an obsolete OS9, so trayloaders become gamemachines with the old OS for the youngest children. They love Bugdom.

and I sometimes play Total Annihilation that cannot be played on X

[PaperNotes]

I remember the pre OS X (or should that be pre-MacIntel) days when Mac users were the dimmest of dimwits and created whole websites and wrote massive articles about how co-operative multitasking was superior to pre-emptive multitasking, that their Power PC processors really were as fast as Apple's charts showed and that gaming was being revived on Macs because of Microsoft's use of Power PC in the 360. Still lots of dimbos around but getting better.

[Railroader]

I think you have your timeline a little skewed there PaperNotes.

[PaperNotes]

A little overlappyish.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by goMac 

System 7 was an awesome upgrade from 6. Those were the really great days, all sorts of little shareware games, plus commercial Mac gaming support was pretty good too. LucasArts put out a bunch of awesome stuff.

I won't argue against the fact that a lot of cool third-party software and games came out for the Mac around that time. That's definitely true - I'm talking about the OS itself, which in my opinion started its journey down the road to what OS 9 became right around the time of System 7.

[Big Mac]

It's hard to appreciate the classic Mac OS in 2008 if you've had no history with it. If you judge it not by itself but as compared to OS X, you will have an unfavorable opinion of it. Unless you lived it in those times, you just will not get what was great about it.

[CharlesS]

Aw c'mon, can't we just have a talk about software without making things personal?

Anyway, I've been a Mac user since 1985 and used every Mac OS from System 2.0/Finder 4.1 to Mac OS X 10.5.1, so yes, I've had a history with it. System 6 and below I loved. Starting at about System 7.5, that changed more to tolerance, because hey, at least it didn't have a Registry, and of course Copland/Rhapsody/OS X was just around the corner anyway. Once OS X actually came into being, it made me excited about the Mac OS again, so there's your history.

[Big Mac]

I wasn't talking to you, Charles.

[boots]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Aw c'mon, can't we just have a talk about software without making things personal?

Anyway, I've been a Mac user since 1985 and used every Mac OS from System 2.0/Finder 4.1 to Mac OS X 10.5.1, so yes, I've had a history with it. System 6 and below I loved. Starting at about System 7.5, that changed more to tolerance, because hey, at least it didn't have a Registry, and of course Copland/Rhapsody/OS X was just around the corner anyway. Once OS X actually came into being, it made me excited about the Mac OS again, so there's your history.

That's not far from my history too.

Perhaps I was just really fortunate in the combination of hardware and software I ran. I didn't have a lot of 3rd part stuff (ever, still don't) to mess up the extensions, and 7.5 was really functional and solid on my hardware.

Wouldn't be the first time I was just plain lucky.

All this is making me nostalgic. I want to go back and revisit some of these things and see just how rose tinted my glasses have become.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Kenneth 

Mac OS 9 is not that bad.

Yes it was. In fact, OS 9 was the number one reason I didn't own a Mac at that time.

Also remember, by the time OS 9 was actually out, it was competing with Win 98 and Win NT 4, and eventually Win 2000.

[Andrew Stephens]

I've used every OS from 6 to 10.5. As a designer it got pretty useful around 7.5 but it was always prone to crashes. How we used to love the old freeze/bomb/loose your work routine. And those fantastic houres spent combing through extensions and disabling them to try to get a stable reboot.

Now is much better. We only have application has unexpectedly quit/loose all your work and combing through reams of preference files trying to track down the corrupted file to get a stable reboot.

Much better.

;-)

[SirCastor]

As I recall, Mac OS 9 was an afterthought. Something to keep us satisfied while we were waiting for the ever-not-present OS X which was supposed to have been here yesterday. I wasn't big on OS 9, but I did love the older Mac OSs. I remember trying to explain the finer points to my parents about why we needed 7.5, 7.6, 8.0, and 8.5. I remember thinking that Sherlock was in fact the coolest thing in the world. Most of my understanding of these things was based on what MacMall had told me through a colorful illustrated catalog, or what MacAddict had told me.

A lot of it takes me back too. Do you remember when you were a totally different kind of Mac-fixit guy/gal? When you had a whole slew of steps to go through? Turn of the extensions, disable virtual memory, Ram Doubler is evil... on and on? OS X is different all together, the steps are different.

At any rate, I don't miss the old Mac OS/System too much.

And BTW, I LOVED Rescue! I remember when the game became contraband because the guy who'd written it had gotten a letter from Paramount telling him to stop.

[mikemako]

I got my first Mac in January 2001. It was a 533MHz Dual Processor G4 Powermac. I had owned 2 PCs before this, and had used Windows 98 and Windows ME. I didn't really like Windows, it crashed a lot and had weird glitches, so I got a Mac to try something new. I didn't know anything about Macs.

I hated it. I know many people consider OS 9 "snappy," but for a user coming from Windows, it was slow and stupid. It got funky when more than one application was running at a time (Windows didn't), the Internet seemed slower, and the UI just didn't look very good. I needed the computer for music recording, and I had to develop a habit of saving my songs every few minutes since the Mac would at random completely freeze. Sucked. I was so disappointed that I called Apple and asked them if these problems were normal. They had me re-install the OS but it didn't help.

Only a couple months later, OS X came out. I read about it on the Internet and was intrigued... Now THIS is what I thought a Mac should be. All the talk about how Macs were supposed to be superior, and have an advanced and intuitive UI seemed to make sense now. I noticed that OS X 10.0 was laughably slow, but OMG was it stable, pretty, multitasking capable, and brilliant, and I could see where they were going with this. Unlike OS 9, X seemed to be forward looking, even if there were short-term sacrifices while the code was (quickly) refined.

My next computer would have certainly been a PC if Apple had continued with the OS 9 lineage.

[freudling]

My take.

I have used System 6 and up. Currently, I have a MBP running Leopard, and Leopard is an awesome OS. However, I get sick of the multi-tasking. There is too much going on and it is distracting. I find that if I allocate some tasks to an older machine, I am more productive. For instance, I am thinking of writing a book. However, with skype and mail burning away in the Dock, I would be subject to constant distractions.

So I have begun using a tricked out PB Wallstreet with OS 9.2. I really like 9.2. Fast, very fast. Too fast. Wait, not too fast, but fast. Way more responsive than anything OS X has produced. There are still a lot of good programs for OS 9.2, and I am connected wirelessly to the web. I bought a Newton 2100 to go along with it.

[TETENAL]

Have you thought about quitting Skype and Mail?